Crypto Space Over The Past Week From 19 To 25 March, 2018

At the end of the week, we resume everything that the crypto community talked about over the past seven days. This week the officials discussed status of cryptocurrency market at G20 summit, in an attempt to hack the Binance exchange a "Russian trace" was found, Trump banned the Venezuelan cryptocurrency Petro, and Jack Dorsey stated that in ten years bitcoin would become the single world's currency.

Summit G20 About Cryptocurrencies

The summit G20 in Buenos Aires (Argentina) became one of the most noticeable events of week. Traders closely watched the summit to find out whether regulators are going to take any coordinated measures to tighten the cryptocurrency policy. In a letter to the heads of central banks and G20 , the chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the head of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, stated that cryptocurrency assets currently do not pose a risk to global financial stability due to their small size, limited use and inability to replace currency. This indicates that the connection of the cryptocurrency with the rest of the financial system is limited.

Also, the governor of the Central Bank of Argentina, Federico Sturzenegger, said that the participating countries agreed that the cryptocurrencies should be carefully studied and they need more information before making any proposals for regulation. At a press conference, he noted that the deadline for making recommendations would in July.

"The Russian trace" on Binance

This week bitcoin rate deep below $ 9,000 when Japanese Nikkei announced plans of the local Financial Services Agency to issue a warning and the likely closure of Binance exchange operations. In response to the publication of the Nikkei, the head of Binance Changpeng Zhao stated that the exchange was involved in a constructive dialogue with the Financial Services Agency and did not receive any warnings from the regulator.

Also, there were new details of a large-scale attempt to steal funds on the exchange and manipulate the exchange rate of Viacoin. In the official Binance blog, a list of addresses of phishing sites registered Kireev Sergey Valerievich and Belinskaya Victoria, who already figured in the media in connection with phishing attacks on Bittrex users. In general, experts agree that the place of hackers residence is Eastern Europe.

In addition, it became known that the cryptocurrency exchange wants to settle in Malta. According to CEO Binance Changpeng Zhao, the company is preparing to open an office there. Soon Binance have to conclude an agreement with a number of Maltese banks, which can provide access to deposit and withdrawal of funds.

The Japanese exchange Coincheck will delist anonymous cryptocurrencies Monero, Dash and ZCash after the January hack, when NEM coins were stolen from the platform for $ 534 million. According to the report, Coincheck will buy the assets of clients stored in these three anonymous cryptocurrencies at a fixed price. Recall, the exchange froze trading all cryptocurrencies and their withdrawal after theft of NEM and resumed operations with certain currencies on March, 12. The company has already reimbursed more than $ 440 million to 260,000 affected customers from its own funds.

USA: Trump banned Petro, SEC to inspect cryptocurrency hedge funds

On March 22, the Wall Street Journal published information that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is preparing to test approximately one hundred crypto hedge funds. According to the source, the investigators will report any suspicious activity that wiould revealed during the investigation, but their main goal is to understand what policy the SEC should carry out with respect to the cryptocurrency.

The US Treasury has instructed the Office for the Control of Foreign Assets (OFAC) to include cryptocurrency addresses in the national sanctions list. The Treasury ordered people who identified wallets and addresses belonging to persons on the sanctions list to immediately report them to the Office for Control over Foreign Assets. Also, the agency demanded from the market as such, that is, from companies and cryptocurrency exchanges, to cooperate in tracking suspicious addresses.

On the same day, President Trump signed an order banning the Venezuelan cryptocurrency Petro. In turn, the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, said that since March 23, all citizens and businesses will be able to start buying Petro for Chinese Yuan, Russian Rubles, Turkish lira and Euro, as well as Bitcoin, Ethereum and NEM.

However, the ambiguous attitude to the cryptocurrencies did not prevent the US Marshals Service once again successfully sell the bitcoins. The press release said that bitcoins went to two bidders: one buy 2100, and the other - 70.7 bitcoins.

Stellar Develops The Lightning, Huawei — The Blockchain Smartphone

Following the ambitious plans presented in the road map earlier this year, Stellar Development Foundation published an official specification. It describes how and when it plans to implement Lightning technology, which was originally developed for bitcoin. Stellar CTF, Jed McCaleb, said in an interview with CNBC that in the future a universal payment network will run, including a public registry that everyone can see but can not arbitrarily change. It will allow people to use dollars or euros or etc.

IBM announced the creation of the smallest computer in the world - the size of a salt grain. The production of a device designed for logistics apps will cost less than $ 0.10. The idea is to use such computers to link physical objects and records about them in the blockchain. The technology, which implies the storage of records is extremely effective in the management of supply systems, where the issues of the origin of objects and their authenticity are relevant.

But not everyone regards anonymity as the keystone to the success of cryptocurrency. A group of well-known economists and financial innovators are planning to create "the first non-anonymous digital currency based on the blockchain" called Saga (SGA). According to the website, Saga tokens will be available starting from the fourth quarter of this year, paying off with airtime or making a transfer to the bank where Saga reserves are stored.

In a recent report of analysts bitcoin exchange BitMEX, the volumes of transactions in the Bitcoin Cash and in bitcoins using the function Segregated Witness (SegWit) are compared. Although the evidence suggests that the recognition of SegWit in Bitcoin went slightly faster than the recognition of Bitcoin Cash, and led to an increase in the volume of bitcoin-transactions, the supporters of Bitcoin Cash may object that the essence of their fork is more in the philosophy of greater block capacity in the long term, than in the actual growth in the volume of transactions in the short term.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce at Google, said that the corporation, which that week banned ICO and cryptocurrency advertising, is studying the issue of using blockchain hardware, but so far Google has no working products on this technology.

A month after the French manufacturer of hardware wallets Ledger confirmed the vulnerability of their devices to the man-in-the-middle attack, 15-year-old information security specialist Salem Rashid demonstrated a new type of attack that hackers can use to hacking Ledger Nano S. The company has been updating the firmware since the vulnerability was discovered (1.4.1). Rashid urged users to install it as soon as possible.

The Chinese manufacturer of smartphones Huawei Technologies intends to create a mobile phone that supports blockchain apps. Huawei currently gets the rights to the Sirin Labs SIRIN OS operating system, which will use blockchain apps along with the Android system. According to sources, the talks are preliminary and the agreement has not yet been signed.

Chinese Bitcoin Mining Bitmain has announced Antminer X3, which supports the CryptoNight hash algorithm. The announcement of X3 caused a wave of criticism from the developers of Monero, one of the most popular coins using this hash algorithm. The developers warn that the upcoming Monero hardfork will change the Proof-of-Work algorithm, which means that the Antminer X3 will not be able to sink a coin.

Bitfury announced that with the approval of local authorities on March 20 opens data center for bitcoin mining in Norway. In blog, the largest outside China industrial miner said that the data center will consist of two facilities located near the city of Mu-i-Rana. Bitfury will spend 274 million Norwegian kronor ($ 35 million) to create an infrastructure and hire 30 employees.

The team of the popular ethereum app CryptoKitties is separated from the Canadian company Axiom Zen. The project attracted $ 12 million of venture financing to take the path of independent development. The representative of Axiom Zen said that the collected funds will be directed to the "radical expansion" of the CryptoKitties team, as the new company is to find out "how to scale the blockchain for a billion consumers."

The Bitstamp exchange will be sold to South Korean investors for $ 400 million, the New York Times journalist Nathaniel Popper wrote on Twitter on March 22.

Opinion leaders

Snowden said that he does not believe that "bitcoin will always exist," and that its main drawback is not limited bandwidth, but a public register. Answering the question about personal preferences, he said that now he is most interested in Zcash, since its privacy settings are really unique, but many other projects are also coming to this.

On the contrary, Jack Dorsey, one of the leading entrepreneurs of the Silicon Valley, said that bitcoin would outperform the dollar and become the only global Internet currency. According to Dorsey, this can happen "in ten years or earlier". He added that the distribution of bitcoin placed processing services, including Square, in a position to achieve its universal recognition.

On March 9, the new head of the Chinese central bank, Yi Gang, said that "bitcoin is a currency that gives freedom to all who use it," and also stressing that this cryptocurrency is transparent. Analysts expected Ghana to be optimistic about bitcoin, given its pro-market philosophy and plans to liberalize the Chinese financial industry. Potentially, the appointment of the new head of the People's Bank of China and the re-election of President Xi Jinping as chairman of the PRC could lead to the regulation of the currency and the legalization of trade in them.

Markus Schenk, one of the heads of Deutsche Bank's corporate and investment banking department, admitted that the recent trip to China opened his eyes to him: the retail banking market is ripe to completely change as a result of the advent of new technologies. Under new technologies, the banker understands, in particular, crypto-currency wallets that allow you to store money in digital form and eliminate the need for a third party, such as a bank.

Co-president of the Asia-Pacific branch of MasterCard Ari Sarker told the Financial Times that the company positively assesses the idea of ​​possible work with digital currencies, which will release state-owned banks. He noted that if governments create national digital currencies, MasterCard will be happy to treat them more favorably than to cryptocurrencies in general: while the cryptocurrency, which is of value, is controlled by the regulator, it is not anonymous and meets all official requirements.

Fundstrat analyst Tom Lee predicts that by March 2020 the bitcoin price will reach $ 91,000. Lee bases his forecast on a chart that shows the dynamics of the price of this crypto currency after past market failures. Also, Lee and his colleagues analyzed the market of altcoyins and reported that the cycle of the "bull market" for altcoyins will begin between mid-August and mid-September.

Experts from Morgan Stanley say that recent fluctuations in the cost of bitcoin are similar to the cycle of the boom and decline of Internet technologies since the dot-com crash, but "on steroids." Morgan Stanley estimates that bitcoin price fluctuations almost duplicate the jumps of the Nasdaq Composite index in the periods before and after 2000, but the speed of what is happening now is 15 times higher.